He and Wilson left out of there then, pulling the creepers after them.
Not far down the road, they pushed the creepers off in a ditch and continued, Jake carrying the shoes under his arm. “These are all right,” he said. “I might can get some pussy wearing these kind of shoes. My mama don’t care if I wear things like this.”
“Hell, she don’t care if you cut your head off,” Wilson said.
“That’s the way I see it,” Jake said.
Fish Night
It was a bleached-bone afternoon with a cloudless sky and a monstrous sun.
The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm. No wind blew.
Through the swelter came a worn, black Plymouth, coughing and belching white smoke from beneath its hood. It wheezed twice, backfired loudly, died by the side of the road.
The driver got out and went around to the hood. He was a man in the hard winter years of life, with dead, brown hair and a heavy belly riding his hips. His shirt was open to the navel, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The hair on his chest and arms was gray.
A younger man climbed out on the passenger side, went around front too. Yellow sweat-explosions stained the pits of his white shirt. An unfastened, striped tie was draped over his neck like a pet snake that had died in its sleep.
“Well?” the younger man asked.
The old man said nothing. He opened the hood. A calliope note of steam blew out from the radiator in a white puff, rose to the sky, turned clear.
“Damn,” the old man said, and he kicked the bumper of the Plymouth as if he were kicking a foe in the teeth. He got little satisfaction out of the action, just a nasty scuff on his brown wingtip and a jar to his ankle that hurt like hell.
“Well?” the young man repeated.
“Well what? What do you think? Dead as the can-opener trade this week. Deader. The radiator’s chickenpocked with holes.”
“Maybe someone will come by and give us a hand.”
“Sure.”
“A ride anyway.”
“Keep thinking that, college boy.”
“Someone is bound to come along,” the young man said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Who else takes these cutoffs? The main highway,
that’s where everyone is. Not this little no-account shortcut.” He finished by glaring at the young man.
“I didn’t make you take it,” the young man snapped. “It was on the map. I told you about it, that’s all. You chose it. You’re the one that decided to take it. It’s not my fault. Besides, who’d have expected the car to die?”
“I did tell you to check the water in the radiator, didn’t I? Wasn’t that back as far as El Paso?”
“I checked. It had water then. I tell you, it’s not my fault. You’re the one that’s done all the Arizona driving.”
“Yeah, yeah,” the old man said, as if this were something he didn’t want to hear. He turned to look up the highway.
No cars. No trucks. Just heat waves and miles of empty concrete in sight.
They seated themselves on the hot ground with their backs to the car. That way it provided some shade — but not much. They sipped on a jug of lukewarm water from the Plymouth and spoke little until the sun fell down. By then they had both mellowed a bit. The heat had vacated the sands and the desert chill had settled in. Where the warmth had made the pair snappy, the cold drew them together.
The old man buttoned his shirt and rolled down his sleeves while the young man rummaged a sweater out of the back seat. He put the sweater on, sat back down. “I’m sorry about this,” he said suddenly.
“Wasn’t your fault. Wasn’t anyone’s fault. I just get to yelling sometime, taking out the can-opener trade on everything but the can openers and myself. The days of the door-to-door salesman are gone, son.”
“And I thought I was going to have an easy summer job,” the young man said.
The old man laughed. “Bet you did. They talk a good line, don’t they?”
“I’ll say!”
“Make it sound like found money, but there ain’t no found money, boy. Ain’t nothing simple in this world. The company is the only one ever makes any money. We just get tireder and older with more holes in our shoes. If I had any sense I’d have quit years ago. All you got to make is this summer —”
“Maybe not that long.”
“Well, this is all I know. Just town after town, motel after motel, house after house, looking at people through screen wire while they shake their heads No. Even the cockroaches at the sleazy motels begin to look like little fellows you’ve seen before, like maybe they’re door-to-door peddlers that have to rent rooms too.”
The young man chuckled. “You might have something there.”
They sat quietly for a moment, welded in silence. Night had full grip on the desert now. A mammoth gold moon and billions of stars cast a whitish glow from eons away.
The wind picked up. The sand shifted, found new places to lie down. The undulations of it, slow and easy, were reminiscent of the midnight sea. The young man, who had crossed the Atlantic by ship once, said as much.
“The sea?” the old man replied. “Yes, yes, exactly like that. I was thinking the same. That’s part of the reason it bothers me. Part of why I was stirred up this afternoon. Wasn’t just the heat doing it. There are memories of mine out here,” he nodded at the desert, “and they’re visiting me again.”
The young man made a face. “I don’t understand.”
“You wouldn’t. You shouldn’t. You’d think I’m crazy.”
“I already think you’re crazy. So tell me.”
The old man smiled. “All right, but don’t you laugh.”
“I won’t.”
A moment of silence moved in between them. Finally the old man said, “It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right — I mean, doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some soft fabric, that it’s different from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big, dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon?”
“You lost me.”
The old man sighed. “But it feels different. Right? You can feel it too, can’t you?”
“I suppose. Sort of thought it was just the desert air. I’ve never camped out in the desert before, and I guess it is different.”
“Different, all right. You see, this is the road I got stranded on twenty years back. I didn’t know it at first, least not consciously. But down deep in my gut I must have known all along I was taking this road, tempting fate, offering it, as the football people say, an instant replay.”
“I still don’t understand about fish night. What do you mean, you were here before?”
“Not this exact spot, somewhere along in here. This was even less of a road back then than it is now. The Navajos were about the only ones who traveled it. My car conked out, like this one today, and I started walking instead of waiting. As I walked the fish came out. Swimming along in the starlight pretty as you please. Lots of them. All the colors of the rainbow. Small ones, big ones,
thick ones, thin ones. Swam right up to me...right through me! Fish just as far as you could see. High up and low down to the ground.
“Hold on, boy. Don’t start looking at me like that. Listen: You’re a college boy, you know something about these things. I mean, about what was here before we were, before we crawled out of the sea and changed enough to call ourselves men. Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?”
“I guess, but —”
“Millions and millions of years ago this desert was a sea bottom. Maybe even the birthplace of man. Who knows? I read that in some science books. And I got to thinking this: If the ghosts of people who have lived can haunt houses, why can’t the ghosts of creatures long dead haunt where they once lived, float about in a ghostly sea?”